John W. James

Where were you when I needed you?

The saddest question we ever hear is, "Where were you when I needed you?"

That's what people ask when they find out what we do in helping grievers. We're presenting helpful and accurate information on this site, at the time you need it most, with the hope that you'll never need to ask that question.

It's an honor and a sad privilege to be addressing you, knowing that each of you has recently experienced the death of someone important to you. We also know some of you are reading this because of your care and concern for someone who is confronted by the death of someone important in their life.

We bring our personal experience in dealing with the deaths of people who were important to us, and our professional know-how in helping grievers for more than 30 years. We'll help you distinguish between the "raw grief" that is your normal and natural reaction to the death, and the equally normal "unresolved grief" that relates to the unfinished emotions that are part of the physical ending of all relationships.

A basic reality for most grieving people is difficulty concentrating or focusing. With that in mind, we asked Tributes.com to print our articles in a large type font to make them easier to read. Sharing our concern for grieving people, they agreed.

Ask The Grief Experts

The warm and fuzzies that never happened. (Published 2/28/2011)

Q:

My mother recently passed away at the age of 94 and the Christmas holidays were extremely difficult. Even though my mother lived a long life, we didn't get along too well during my younger days and there was much resentment. Now I feel guilty but devastated that I still bear hard feelings, yet am so sad that my mother is gone and we never became loving mother and daughter. How can I overcome the sadness and the guilt?

A Grief Expert Replies:

Dear Joan,

Thanks for your note and question.

Without diminishing the uniqueness of your relationship with your mother, and your very personal feelings, the situation you’ve described is all too common. Hopefully, our response here will help you, but will also help untold others who have and continue to struggle with parallel issues. So thank you for bringing up a topic that needs explanation from a Grief Recovery point of view.

In order to help, we first need to define grief and unresolved grief. We will use your statements to help define both.

“Grief is the conflicting feelings caused by the end of or change in a familiar pattern of behavior.” [Page 3, The Grief Recovery Handbook]

If you’re wondering how we might define “conflicting feelings” you don’t have to look any further than your own statement, “Now I feel guilty but devastated that I still bear hard feelings, yet am so sad that my mother is gone…”

The conflict is between feeling bad about the hard feelings you still harbor, and the sadness that she is gone.

“Unresolved griefis always about undelivered emotional communications that accrue within a relationship over the course of time.” [Page 51, The Grief Recovery Handbook]

Again, a statement in your note defines unresolved grief when you say, “…we never became loving mother and daughter.” Hearing that, I would guess the warm and fuzzies never happened, and her death ends the hope of that dream coming true.

Like you, many people are left with that kind of lament; and with the fact that the death has ended the possibility of repair.

The naturally occurring feelings of grief—the sadness, the missing of someone [even people with whom we had difficult relationships]—usually subside within time. Not as a product of time, but as the result of adapting to the new reality of living life without someone important here.

So let’s focus on the Unresolved Grief which is the by-product of what was left emotionally incomplete at the time of the death. Time doesn’t do anything to diminish or to finish what was left emotionally incomplete. That is where Grief Recovery comes in. It’s painful enough to have carried the resentments you had about your mother for all these years, but it would be tragic—for you—to carry them on even after she is gone. At this point, you might be able to see that your resentments —no matter how or by whom they were caused—are now the exclusive creation of your memory. And you are the one carrying them forward, where they can only harm you – and only you.

Unresolved grief drains energy and robs choice. The Grief Recovery Handbook can help you discover and complete everything that was left emotionally unfinished for you in your relationship with your mother who died. As you do that, you will be able to shed the resentments and other painful emotions you’re carrying, and regain energy and choice. The choice of taking the actions in the Handbook that will help you is yours to make.